The Amazon fires pseudo news panic illustrates how easy it is to throw an election via social media

As we now know, social and pseudo news media have been in meltdown, falsely reporting about fires in the Amazon (see many other posts on this, below). A lot of social media folks are in full panic and sharing items that are not true. My Instagram feed, which I curated to be free of politics, is now filled with Amazon fire propaganda messaging from people living in fear. There is no way to counter this onslaught. If someone offers a link to reputable source, they will be called fascists or Nazis.

MSN was running an online survey and at the time I took this snapshot, it had gathered half a million votes, 70% of whom are concerned about a fairly normal annual event that none of them cared about a decade ago.

This illustrates the incredible power of social media propaganda messaging to leverage yellow journalism pseudo news reports, many of which misreported the situation and greatly exaggerated. This false pseudo news is then amplified by likes and sharing online.

Social media is a frictionless platform for the dissemination of propaganda messaging. Seeing what just took place in the past few days, can you imagine the firepower about to unleashed during the next national election in the U.S.? The brutal propaganda messaging on social media threatens to take down democracy.